With online video such a hot medium in the web 2.0 landspace there are a crowd of video sites in the market. PureVideo Search, a video search engine, recently launched to try and assist in organizing the online video space.
PureVideo Networks is Los Angeles based media and technology startup founded by Erik Hawkins and Greg Morrow. In addition, to the PureVideo Search they have also created StupidVideos.com and GrindTV. Erik recently was interviewed by Folkonomy and gave some insight into where he sees the entertainment and media industry 10 or 20 years from now:
"...I suppose we’ll see even more time shifting, more mobility, and a cleaner user experience. Collaborative filtering and user profiles/playlists should also advance quite a bit, so you should be able to access your media collection from anywhere, or discover new media suited to you easily. I’m not sure what devices we’ll be using, but I do think that most media playback devices will be IP based, so that you can interact with the content, and so that your usage can be tracked."
While video search is not a new idea with companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo already offering video search services, PureVideo Search is a meta search engine for video. This means that PureVideo Search combines crawling the web looking for items with a feed-based search index. The PureVideo Search homepage presentation of categorized top 10 videos from around the web (i.e. YouTube, AOL Music, MSN, ESPN, CNN.com, etc.) could help to keep users coming back for more. The categories include "Music," "Sports," "Comedy," "Viral," "Entertainment," and "News." Finally, PureVideo Search offers a widget that enables users to add a videos search results to a personal homepage, blog or other web site.
Bottom-line: While PureVideo Search offers some interesting features, it leaves room to improve its search functionality and add additional web 2.0 hooks. I expect it will - afterall it is currently just a beta product.
